A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Oct. 26: A very pleasant surprise.

No, it's not the
headline story “Whoopi Goldberg praises Moncton firefighters after
tour bus blaze”. (She thanked the firefighters – which was
certainly a nice thing to do. But that's surely not the most
important thing that happened in provincial news yesterday.)

Nor is another page
1 flash, “Opportunities NB CEO promises to track use of public
money”. If he promised he would NOT track the use of public money,
then that would be a story. But tracking it is what he was hired to
do. This is in a class with “New bus driver promises to drive bus”.

What makes that page
worth reading is a story that is part of a series, “School
closures, Policy 409 a case of “rural bullying,' academic says”.
In it, a university teacher from a rural background talks about the
importance of the rural school in the community, an importance that
the government is ignoring in its obsession with education as a
cashflow issue. It's much more than that.

And it's not just a
matter of the cost of bussing.

In my high school
teaching days, many students had the opportunity for some very
enriching clubs. There were after school sports, of course. There was
also current events, debating, writing, film studies,

many choirs
(including a French choir), several French clubs, a school orchestra
and a band (with instruments provided, and with many participants
starting learning from scratch), Red Cross, Electronics club,
stamp-collecting, Inter School Christian Fellowship…..

And these clubs were
an important part of learning. But this can't happen in rural schools
– or, often, in urban ones because of the restraints imposed by
bussing. In fact, you won't find much in the way of this intellectual
and artistic development even among adults in Moncton. Instead,
intellectual stimulation means to drink beer outdoors while watching
people with guitars jump up and down with lights flashing.

A solution? In rural
schools, have a club day once a week during regular school hours.
Cubs are just as important as regular school work. (I don't put t his
forward as a 'must'. It's just a suggestion for politicians to think
'outside the box'.

In urban schools,
get rid of the school busses. For many decades, urban children walked
to school or took public transport. For most of my own elementary
school days, I walked about forty minutes each way to school. Then,
when high school was more distant, I used public transport. Now
Moncton is a city whose most notable feature is empty public transit
busses. We would actually save money by offering free or low cost
students' passes.

Think of the rural
school as more than children. Adults need intellectual stimulation,
too. Offer classes (or clubs) to meet those adult needs. Use
schoolrooms as public radio or TV stations to serve local needs. Use
them to to offer extension courses from our universities and college
system.

Many rural people
are cut off from the world. Rural New Brunswick also has a high rate
of functional illiteracy. That hurts them and it hurts all of us.
They need those schools to connect with the world.

For once, New
Brunswick should not treat such problems as economic ones, but as
social ones. It should define the social needs that have to be met.
Then design the school system.

(It might also help
if we had confidence the government was taking a tough look at the
tax contribution of the very wealthy in this province. And it might
also look up the meaning of the term “tax haven”.)

The other, big story is on A 6. It's all about a man who treasures
his family and loves sports. Is that unusual in Moncton?

The very pleasant
surprise is the opinion and commentary pages.

The editorial is
actually quite decent, though it cannot avoid a favourite piece of
propaganda. It's about the practice of the government to hide
information that should be available to the public. Fair enough. But,
in the last paragraph, it puts the responsibility for this in the
laps of those evil people called bureaucrats. In fact, such decisions
are not made by bureaucrats, evil or otherwise. They are made by evil
politicians – the ones we elect.

Norbert Cunninghan
has a superb column on climate change. He raises concerns about what
it is likely to do in terms ranging from the distribution of world
economic power to how it may affect the Canadian border to how if may
affect New Brunswick to how it may affect us here in Moncton. He
raises points I have not seen before – and he makes eminent sense.

As I read this, I
realized that Harper's refusal to deal with this issue was worse than
criminal. And he's not the only one. A great deal of time around the
world has been lost. And we have still yet to realize the enormous
effort this will demand of all of us. Yes, I know oil creates jobs. I
also know it kills people. And dead people are lousy workers.

This is an excellent
column, both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Craig Babstock has a
quite decent column on the need for government to deal with the
legality of marijuana as quickly as possible. His reasoning is that
this is causing huge problems in cases that are now before the
courts. He's probably right - though it shouldn't cause problems.

People now facing
marijuana charges are people who, presumably, broke a law. They
committed a criminal act, knowing that it was a criminal act. That
the law may change some day doesn't change their deliberate breaking
of a law to make money for themselves. (Not to mention that in the
process of getting this product to market, people were often
murdered.)

All the above is
also true of, say, bootleggers who were imprisoned for committing
illegal acts which, in the process, involved killing a great many
people. Al Capone did not become a non-criminal when prohibition
ended. (Just thinking – and thinking is what a column is supposed
to encourage. That makes this one a good one.)

The guest commentary
by Susie Proulx-Daigle is another good one. It's about government
plans to privatize parts of medicare, saying it will save money. She
pointed out that the provincial government, in a show of democracy at
work, held a public forum and a health care summit on the issue. In
both cases, the keynote speakers were advocates of privatization.
Gee! What a surprise!

Privatization of
laundry is just a first step in a drive to privatize all health care
so that we, like the U.S., can have the least affordable and the
least accessible health care system in the world. And, as
Proulx-Daigle explains, privatizing segments of health care will
probably be a money-loser from day one.

This is worth
reading.

Alec Bruce is an
excellent columnist, of course. This time, he goes beyond excellent.
It's a very general look at the sort of thing New Brunswick should be
doing for its people, especially its young ones. It's general because
it has to be. It's not a blueprint for the future; it's opening a
door to look at what we should be thinking about. And it's a very
intelligent look.

This is far the best
of all the opinion and commentary pages I have seen in the Irving
press. And it ranks with some pages of the best I have read in any
paper.

Now, if only it had some analysis of foreign news….

Then we drop to the
Canada&World section. It has four, big photos of Monctonians
holding up giant cheques. Judging by the space it takes, this is (or
close to) the biggest story in Canada&World News.

For reading, I would
recommend B2. “Laser treatments may ease the pain for 'napalm girl'
decades after attack.” Perhaps you remember Kim Phuc, a young girl
in the Vietman of 1972 who was screaming and covered in flames from
the napalm stuck to her skin. Now, today, she still suffers terrible
pain from the burns, and is getting free treatment from the U.S.
government.

How Christian of the
American government!

Nobody knows how
many hundreds of thousands of men, women, girls, boys and babies
either burned to death from napalm bombs in Vietnam, or lived just
short and painful lives. Others have died or lived short, horrible
lives because of the dreadful effects of agent orange that was
sprayed over Vietnam. But the U.S. government didn't help them.

It had to help Kim
because she was the one whose photo appeared in most of the papers to
tell us what that war was really about. Meanwhile, for the millions
who died, often in terrible pain, tough luck.

Kim was P.R., an
advertising stunt to cover up one of the great mass murders of
history.

This story is worth
reading – if you let it make you think.

The photo was to
prove that the U.S. is not cruel like ISIS or Assad or the Taliban –
all of whom put together have killed far fewer people than the U.S.
did in Vietnam alone.

Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction? Well, nobody has ever found any of them.

We fight wars to
bring freedom to people? Well, even assuming they want freedom, can
you seriously believe they want it enough to get killed by the
millions; to flee their countries in the tens of millions? To suffer
starvation and loss of husbands and wives and children?

Is Libya a happier
land since we bombed it and murdered Ghadaffi?

And while you're at
it, count the countries we've brought freedom to. No, not North
Korea. We left that a dictatorship – just like South Korea. Not
Egypt. The U.S. overthrew the elected government of Egypt, and
installed a military dictatorship. (It will now hold an election –
but one controlled by the military – and with the potential
opposition leaders in jail.) It also overthrew an elected government
in Haiti – to hold a phony election that put an American puppet in
power. Over the years, it destroyed democracies and assassinated
elected leaders all over South America, usually putting dictators in
charge.

Almost all wars are
fought to gain economic power. That's what empires were and are
about. Britain did not conquer India to bring it Gilbert and Sullivan
operas. The Second World War was not fought to save Jews or to fight
Naziism. We were as anti-semitic as Hitler was. And our business
leaders in the west, for the most part, admired and even supported
Naziism.

The U.S. did not
fund, supply, and train a 'rebel' army in Syria to bring it freedom.
If that were its motive, it would have invaded the worst
dictatorship in the world – Saudi Arabia. (Incidentally, there's
reason to doubt the sincerity of the rebels. The U.S. has spent
$500,000,000 training 'rebels' to produce a total of 50 soldiers. The
rest deserted to the other side with their weapons.)

This story about Kim
can make us think of many things – the immense cruelty and
suffering caused by war – the greed that usually drives it – the
immense sums of money spent on war, and so cannot be spent on
schools, health, income security – and saving this planet we have
to live on.

We need a day to remember the dead of wars – all the dead of all
the wars. I don't suggest we use Nov. 11 for that purpose. We owe
Nov. 11 to those who died and those who risked death. But we also
need a day to remember all the dead of all wars, to think of exactly
why it is they had to die, to question why we still use war, and who
benefits from it.

Next to that is the
story of how the Assembly of First nations in New Brunswick is
dissolving. We need much more information about that, and we need
informed opinion about it. Exactly what are the problems about land
claims? What is it that we can do to be useful? Didn't we have a
national report about this sort of thing just months ago? What have
we done about it? What should we be doing?

B3 has a good story
about how the Trans-Pacific trade law could directly affect all of us
in a harmful way. It deals with the clause on copyright which
deprives Canada of the power to control its own copyright laws -
which does nothing to help us but only to create bigger profits for
copyright holders.

B4 is a very
important story about operations of our secret police, CSIS, in
Canada and in foreign countries in association with foreign spy
operations like Britain's MI5 or the CIA. In other words, this could
integrate all of them. Think that's a good idea? Well, American and
British aims in the world are not necessarily those of Canada.

Then there's the
sticky bit about how the CIA and MI5 have been known to be not above
assassination and national destablization schemes.

And under Bill
C-51, CSIS is scheduled to do this without any supervision by the
Canadian government – or any knowledge of what it's doing. No
police force in any nation should have that kind of freedom.

B6 is about the
refugee crisis affecting the Middle East and Europe. This could be a
major step to the breakdown of the European Union. The reality is
that Europe cannot handle this migration. With the best will in the
world (which most of Europe doesn't have), with significant help from
Canada and the U.S. (which isn't going to happen), there is no
solution to the refugee problem. There is only violence, mass murder,
and dreadful suffering. So let's get real.

The major factor in
this is the fighting in Syria. I'm not sure that ending that fighting
will end the problem for the region. So many issues, like the Turkish
war with Kurds, the Israeli occupation of Palestine (and the dream of
a Greater Israel), the Saudi Arabia/U.S. war on Yemen can worsen the
situation in the region and, thus, in Europe.

The U.S. foreign
policy that began with the invasion of Iraq has become one of the
great disasters of history – for all of the world, including the
U.S. Its consequences for the whole world are not foreseeable. Those
consequences could well include the collapse of the American Empire.

The story suggests a
settlement of the war in Syria. It's worth a try. And it's a war that
was never justified in the first place. The “rebellion” was
cooked up by the U.S. It hired the rebels, equipped them, and trained
them, all with the help of that wonderful democracy, Saudi Arabia.
U.S. interventions in the middle east have done nothing but to hurt
the U.S. Iraq has not forgotten what the U.S. did to it. That 's why
it has asked Russia to help it against ISIS. (That didn't make
Irving news, but it's kind of important.) U.S. interventions and
greed have made Russia the major player in the region. The U.S. needs
the war in Syria to end.

The obvious and
easiest way is to accept a deal that Assad has offered. If the U.S.
will stop its support of the rebels, Assad will hold an election.
Sounds reasonable. (and one can always negotiate the fine points to
make sure it's a fair election.) Will the U.S. accept it?

No.

The war isn't about
a phony rebellion. It's about U.S. capitalists wanting control of the
whole region, including Syria. It's about greed combined with
stupidity. It, like the story of a little girl in Vietnam burned into
a life of pain, is about indifference to human needs and human
suffering. It's about a willingness to kill as many millions as
necessary to boost profit margins.

The greatest problem
facing the world is the power of an uncontrolled capitalism to
dominate the policies of all the great powers. This is what should
have been the central issue in the Canadian election, but which
wasn't even mentioned, not by any party.

Uncontrolled
capitalism will destroy itself, and us with it. Greed and stupidity
are a bad combination to guide any government. For its own sake,
capitalism must be brought under control. Legalizing marijuana is a
big deal in the federal election– as was the issue of the niqab.
Uncontrolled capitalism is a far bigger deal.

Yes, she lives, I think, in BC. She lived in the US for a time, then moved. I don't know when that was or what caused the move.As to Willy, I think I know who you are. And I shall never forgive you nor forget you for your blatant attempt to grab credit for the rise in readership.

Yes, she lives, I think, in BC. She lived in the US for a time, then moved. I don't know when that was or what caused the move.As to Willy, I think I know who you are. And I shall never forgive you nor forget you for your blatant attempt to grab credit for the rise in readership.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep